Transcript

My name is Saul Sherman. I was born in the Polish city of Ożarów, and I was able to do everything that I needed; that I wanted. I did not have very much from my family because there were four of the other people in my house that did not live. But I had two sisters around who would exist. But they did not let us go very far because I was sick and I was lucky they had someone from Warsaw, who was a doctor. And at the age of eleven, I was well enough. And then my father had decided that he wanted to go to Canada. It was a tough decision, [but] it wasn’t so tough. We didn’t have enough food because - and he had a business going mind you, but it didn’t work, nobody would deal with it. That’s when he went to Toronto and [from] Toronto, he went right to Montreal. And that’s what he did in Montreal, he had, a building that had, what you call it, suits and things.
It was tough. But I grew up here in Montreal, used to walk with my mother where we bought our food on the Friday morning. I used to walk with my mother. Nobody else would go with me. It was nice. I was old enough, I was twenty-one, when they wanted me to get in [to the military], so I had to wait two weeks to finish for that term. Then I went to the Army directly. They said my blood pressure was low. I says, oh, it’s okay, it’ll be okay. So but I took it anyways and I stayed at the Army and I had a very good term with the Army. Did my job. I wore a radio on my back and I had the thing so I could talk and tell, but that was my job.
I drove in a tank. The first tank was knocked out from under us and the next tank, would you believe it, was a “Sherman” tank. We didn’t go separate with the infantry, we didn’t do that. I had no choice of what they’d do, as long as I did what they wanted me to do in there. The tanks follow around. See, my tank wasn’t really a tank to move because we had everything on those. But the one where I am, they had nothing. It looks like it was a, it was just an ordinary thing because I, I’d be a part of the fight if I stayed inside. My tank was only mobile and we moved it around where we wanted because we can do what, tell people where to go and what to do. But we didn’t have the tank that fights.
My homecoming was very nice. We came home, by the city of Quebec I think, and then I came to Montreal. And we got off and my father and mother, my whole family was there. So what happened, we went right back to the house where we lived, I wasn’t there for a long time, but the family from Toronto was all there for the weekend and so on. Because that’s when we had the family there. And it was very nice. I enjoyed it.